Author Archives: Stephen

Jolly good fellows: Royal Society publishes journal citation distributions

Posted on 4 December 2015 by Stephen

Full marks and a side order of brownie points for the Royal Society: they have started publishing the citation distributions for all their journals. This might seem like an unusual and rather technical move to celebrate but it matters. It … Continue reading →

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Structural Biology: a beginner’s guide?

Posted on 17 October 2015 by Stephen

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I’ve heard, after querying the … Continue reading →

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Lunacy and sanity

Posted on 29 September 2015 by Stephen

It’s less than 24 hours, so this still counts as a timely post. I guess I had been primed because I had been thinking about it. But although I hadn’t set my alarm I found myself awake at 02:52 0n … Continue reading →

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Ch-ch-ch-changes…

Posted on 23 September 2015 by Stephen

There’s a very real chance that this could turn out to be an actual blogpost. In the original sense of the word: a web-log of what’s been happening. Posts have been rather sparse on Reciprocal Space of late. That’s not … Continue reading →

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Pre-prints: just do it?

Posted on 17 July 2015 by Stephen

There is momentum building behind the adoption of pre-print servers in the life sciences. Ron Vale, a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF and Lasker Award winner, has just added a further powerful impulse to this movement in … Continue reading →

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Data not shown: time to distribute some common sense about impact factors

Posted on 23 June 2015 by Stephen

It’s that time of year when all clear-thinking people die a little inside: the latest set of journal impact factors has just been released. Although there was an initial flurry of activity on Twitter last week when the 2015 Journal … Continue reading →

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Can we amend the laws of scholarly publication?

Posted on 29 April 2015 by Stephen

As part of its celebrations to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society arnessas convened a meeting to examine ‘The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication’. The first half of the meeting, … Continue reading →

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Open access: a national licence is not the answer

Posted on 8 April 2015 by Stephen

“Open Access: Is a national licence the answer?” is a proposal by David Price and Sarah Chaytor of University College London for a mechanism to provide full access to everyone within the UK to all published research. It was published on 31 … Continue reading →

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Open letter to the Publishers Association: please amend your open access decision tree

Posted on 30 March 2015 by Stephen

Dear Publishers Association I ask that you amend the open access decision tree you created for incorporation into the guidance notes accompanying the Open Access (OA) policy announced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) in 2013. It may seem odd to … Continue reading →

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Being mortal and being Crick

Posted on 1 March 2015 by Stephen

Two more book reviews from my reading list for this year. On several occasions while reading Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande’s book about end-of-life care, I could feel a lump swelling in my throat and tears pressing for release. I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in book review, death, Life | Comments Off on Being mortal and being Crick